What a whinger, but she does it so prettily, I'm going to humour her. The truth is we're going through a bit of a rocky patch. It started about seven years ago, approximately 11 hours, 26 minutes after she first came round to my flat for a pie and mushy peas supper, and it's not ended yet.

The good thing is I know what the problem is (and therefore I don't need any counselling). It's simple, she's a woman and I'm a man.

But worse still is that she's a modern woman. So not only does she hold down a day job, she also thinks anything I can do she can do better. Sometimes this works to my advantage – like when she took it upon herself to repair the downstairs loo, which had sprung a leak, wilfully ignoring my bright idea to "call a plumber''.

Obviously, there's two sides to every story and she reckons our problems stem not from the eternal man/woman conflict but because I am the failed result of an early experiment into embryo research. As such, I am half-man/half-settee.

Utter rot of course, because I do my fair share of the housework. I think 10 per cent is a fair share.

Of course the jobs I do are not classed as housework by MSF.

These include cutting the lawn, putting out the bins, recording films on Sky+, and doing the odd Saturday night cook leaving the kitchen looking like it's been the venue for a chimpanzees' tequila slammer party.

Imagine my horror the other day, when I discovered her mowing the back lawn. "What do you think you're playing at?'' I demanded to know.

She shrugged but I was on to her. This was obviously a pre-battle skirmish which usually ends with her drawing up one of her lists in which she itemises the jobs we each do around the house to prove one of her silly points.

"You can't cut the lawn, that's a man's job,'' I informed her, surprising myself with my courage.

This might seem a bit cavemanish of me but, hey, new man is a has-been and metrosexual man is on his last tube of moisturiser, so, ladies, prepare yourselves for retrosexual man.

Yes, I'm not taking MSF's nonsense anymore.

The next time she sends me to the supermarket she'd better not berate me for coming back with only half the stuff she wanted (how was I to know she'd written on both sides of the paper?).

And the next time she theatrically slams the kitchen door claiming she doesn't want the whole house smelling of bacon, I shall just open it again and tell her: "Well, I do.''

She just has to accept that we're different.